> Virginia tobacco planters in the late 17th century noticed that
> importing African slaves was an effective way of mitigating the anger of
> free but poor, largely white, young, male Londoners who weren't going to
> share in the wealth of the colony as they had expected--mostly by making
> them an increasingly smaller part of the overall labor force. From that day
> on American capitalists have looked for ways --political, racial, social,
> economic, religious, psychosexual--to deflect, distort and otherwise diffuse
> the class anger of poor white freemen.
> One way to "straighten" out the burden of racism in America is to
> demonstrate to this important part of the US working class that though a
> political attack on the propertied class in America would challenge many of
> their most habitual "feelings" about race and gender, it would also lead to
> more jobs, more education, cleaner, safer, better neighborhoods and so
> forth.
[SNIP]
Without militant calls for
> jobs for all, minimum wages that support decent standards of living for all
> (guaranteed incomes of 30,000 for starters?) , health care for all, and an
> associated broadly-based political movement that can compel hefty
> progressive taxes on incomes, speculation and the like, white male workers
> are not likely in the main to "feel" the value of setting aside the most
> ancient of American customs. (And don't forget the internationalism that
> would be needed to keep capital from doing to us what it did to Mitterand in
> 1980.) A world with this kind of movement might just be the kind that would
> make a working-class white guy, who never cared much for any of this anyway,
> sit up and take a look, even have a converation with some smarty-pants about
> what it all means.
> This is why the flaccid reformism of Rorty--and the
> professoriate--is so pathetic.
This is all correct (there are differences in detail or emphasis that could be and are argued over -- I prefer Barbara Fields's version) -- and ought to form a consensus of sorts on the left.
But to "demonstrate to this important part of the US working class that though... also lead to more jobs, more education, cleaner, safer, better neighborhoods and so forth" a situation has to be created in which those workers will sit still and listen to the demonstration. And *calling for* various good things (I'll accept Steven's list for now) is not the same as immediately recruiting an army to fight for those good things.
A list of good things, or an accurate description of what we "need," is not in itself either a program or a strategy.
Carrol